by Devon Monk
I looked up into his eyes and knew the want there was echoed in me. I could feel it like a strumming beneath my breastbone, a rhythm as primal as time, as the sea, as a heartbeat.
Whatever we might have, whatever our past had made us, whatever our future might be, we could not deny this draw, this connection. We had walked away, but were walking back together as if there were no other state in which we could exist. As if we would always walk back together no matter what ripped us apart.
As if we’d been doing it our whole lives.
And maybe we had.
“Delaney,” he whispered, his palms on either side of my face. In that one word, my name whispered and husky between his lips, lived layers of emotions. I thought I understood. He was trying to protect me, didn’t want to see me hurt again, shot, or worse.
What I should do was step away. Take care of business. Take care of my vampires, my murdered friend, my town.
It would be selfish to do anything else. Reckless.
I grabbed hold of the front of his shirt and dragged his mouth down to mine.
At first, I thought I’d read this wrong, read the heat between us as attraction when it was something else. Then his mouth softened, his body bent. His fingertips pressed against my jaw, cheekbones, back of my skull as he angled my mouth to better fit his own.
I lost myself to the warmth of him, the sensation of his lips, sliding against mine. His tongue darted across the corner of my mouth, and I opened in answer, licking across his lower lip, wanting him and finally, finally tasting him: coffee, mint, and something rich and unique that made my heart beat heavy and slow.
We kissed, until the world disappeared, until the doubts and questions were burned away. When I couldn’t breathe any more, I pulled away.
“Don’t...” Ryder reached for me again, to pull me near.
But I took another step back. And another.
I had kissed him. Kissed the man who had dumped me when I was lying in a hospital bed. Kissed the man who was still not proven innocent. Kissed the man who wouldn’t tell me who he worked for.
All those things were just details.
No, they were the devils.
Was there a difference?
“Who do you work for?”
The warm, open lines of his body tightened. His eyes that had seemed glassy, soft, narrowed down to slits. His mouth hardened into a frown.
“Is that all this is? All you care about?” His voice was deep, angry.
“Why shouldn’t I care about that? You won’t tell me, and we can’t build anything...”
...between us...
“...on this case until you do.”
He wiped his hand over his jaw, and when he pulled it away, there was a sardonic grin where his frown had been. I knew him well enough to know that grin covered anger.
“The case. That’s your priority. Your only priority. Fine. You shouldn’t care who I work for because I’m not going to tell you. If you want answers out of me, then you’re going to have to play by my rules, Delaney, not yours. You can’t use...whatever this is between us to make me do what you want.”
Hold on there. What? He thought I was what—throwing myself at him to get information? I didn’t know if I should laugh or punch him.
My unreasonable heart didn’t care about a case, a murder, or anyone’s innocence. It wailed at me to argue with him, to tell him that I loved him, even though he was being a total idiot. Maybe I was too, but that was exactly the reason I was fighting so hard for him, whether he knew it or not.
But my heart didn’t get to run my mouth. That was all brain territory, and right now my brain was one-hundred percent cop.
“Then we have a problem. You won’t get your answers unless you tell me who you’ll be sharing them with. I, however, have ways to find out what I need to know without you. I will find out who cuts your checks, Ryder. If you want any kind of damage control in your life, in your job, in your innocence or guilt, you’ll talk to me now.”
Silence stretched under the weight of words neither of us could speak. Our secrets locked away all sound, smothered trust. That attraction between us wasn’t gone, but two tons of stubbornness had buried it deep.
“I’ll see you at the station,” he said like I had just asked him to have a nice day. As if this entire conversation had never happened.
“Fine.”
Ryder made it a point to walk around the couch and around me, so we weren’t even within each other’s reach. I didn’t know if that was to keep him or me from reaching out.
But just in case, I crossed my arms over my chest and hugged my ribs tight to keep from doing anything else I’d regret. The door opened, and I waited, back turned, until I heard it click closed again.
Chapter 10
I am not ashamed to admit I spent the next hour under the blanket on my couch trying to sleep while the conversation with Ryder played on endless loop through my brain.
What I had gained from our talk had to be separated into two distinct piles in my head. The case-related stuff, and everything else.
Ryder insisted he was innocent. Told me he was working for an agency that suspected, and now knew, there were vampires in Ordinary. An agency that apparently could take that revelation not only in stride, but also had a plan in place for how they wanted to contact vampires. That suggested to me that they were already in contact with vampires outside of Ordinary.
I wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing. What did he mean they wanted oversight? was that just a code word for nefarious experiments? Blackmail? Something worse? For all I knew that agency could be building an army of vampires, or be making sure that no one else could do so.
While I might trust Ryder, I was not dumb enough to blindly trust some secret agency.
Ryder all but told me those men he’d met in the bar were behind Sven’s death. Maybe one of them had been the hand in the security camera. He’d told me those men were hunting vampires but weren’t part of whoever he was working for.
So we possibly had two groups in town, at the same time, looking for fangers.
Why?
Rossi had said it was an invitation. That Sven’s death was a calling card from his past. Someone who he or Lavius had taught the ichor techne.
Someone who wanted Ryder blamed for the death.
Which could be someone in the opposing group of hunters. Or some other vampire. Or, hell, Old Rossi himself if he had decided the double-double cross was in his best interest.
There simply wasn’t enough hard information to go on at this point.
Maybe when Jean went through the video files she would come up with something solid we could pursue.
Until then, I had a meeting at midnight I didn’t want to be late for.
~~~
By the time I was done checking in with Myra, and Jean who was poring over the video and still hadn’t come up with anything more we could use, it was close to dinner time. So I drove to the diner to eat something while I waited for midnight to roll around.
Piper looked a little startled when I walked in, but quickly gave me a big smile. “Hey, Chief. One tonight?”
“Yep. Go ahead and stick me in a corner, if you have one. I’ve some paperwork to get through.” That was the partial truth. I was going to go through the stack of notes on the case, but mostly I wanted to be somewhere unobtrusive. Whoever had sent me that letter might already be here in the diner. I wanted to people watch for a while.
“This okay?” She stopped at the table in the far corner from the door, next to a window, with a view of the door and most of the diner.
“Perfect. Like you read my mind.”
Her smile faltered, eyes going wide for a half second before she recovered. “Well, I’ll be right back with coffee and give you a minute to check out our diner menu.”
I nodded and made a show of sorting out places for the file folder, my phone, and the wire condiment carrier in the middle of the table.
Something about Piper was tugg
ing at my brain.
I hadn’t told her I wanted dinner, though I did. She’d mentioned the dinner menu. This was exactly the table I’d been hoping to sit at when I’d first walked in and she’d taken me to it without my prompting even though there were a couple other corner tables available.
Coincidence? Skills of a long-time waitress?
Maybe.
But now that I thought about it, she had known Myra, Jean, and I all wanted pie the other night, had brought us coffee, then poured two regular and one decaf without us asking.
I wondered if Piper was a precognitive, or if she had the ability to read minds. I knew she wasn’t vampire...her skin was the wrong tone, she wasn’t vamp-thin. Besides, Rossi would have told me about her when she came to town. She could be a witch, or part fae, or any number of other things, and I wouldn’t know it.
And while being a precog would make waitressing pretty easy, it seemed like there were other and better uses for that kind of talent.
But then, I’d watched gods and goddesses choose jobs for which they were wildly unqualified. Sometimes a person just had to take any gainful employment that was available to them.
And sometimes a person didn’t want their job to have anything to do with anything else in their life.
I made a note to check into her background, and watched her chat with customers. She refilled coffee, ice tea, and sodas at the perfect moment. She checked to see if the meal was all right at exactly the second when no one’s mouth was full so they could actually answer.
That right there was an unnatural talent.
She ducked down the hallway past me, grabbed a wooden highchair, set it next to a table that would seat four, then was at the door to greet a young couple followed by an older couple who were obviously their parents. The young woman was holding a baby on her hip.
The baby wore a tiny umbrella hat.
Sigh.
Still, Piper had known they were coming through that door before they came through that door. She hadn’t even glanced out the window. Definitely some kind of ability.
Creatures and deities were required to check in with any one of us Reeds, and usually Bertie when they first came to town. But mortals with powers, such as witches, telepaths, empaths, mediums, were a little harder to keep track of. So many mortals with powers either didn’t know they had powers, or spent their lives trying to hide them. Most of them probably didn’t even know that Ordinary was a gathering place of the weirdly-abled.
I turned my gaze down to my menu and tried to decide between something moderately healthy, and something that I actually was hungry for.
I glanced back up when I sensed eyes on me.
Ben Rossi and Jame Wolfe had just come in. Jame waved a couple fingers and tipped his head in question.
They wanted to sit with me.
I realized that actually, I’d like some company.
I nodded, but they were already walking my way, either because Jame could tell I was going to say yes because I was giving off body language a werewolf could recognize, or because his boyfriend, Ben was reading my mind.
Wait. I was pretty sure Rossi had told me vampires couldn’t really do that.
No...he’d just said they couldn’t all read each other’s minds.
“Hey-a Chief,” Ben said with a smile that looked a little tight. “Mind?” He waved at the table.
“Have a seat. You off shift?”
Jame Wolfe and Ben Rossi were one of those couples who were testing the tensile strength of love. For one thing, they weren’t even the same kind of creature, Jame being a werewolf, and Ben being a vampire. For another, their two families did not get along.
Add to that the fact they were gay in a small town, and worked together in the fire department. Any one of those would be the coup de grâce to a relationship, but they were making it work.
“Yep. Next two days off. Thought we’d catch a meal,” Ben said.
I raised one eyebrow. Vampires could eat. Not much, and in my experience, they tended to pick a few favorite foods and nibble. Vampires could also drink, which seemed a little easier on them than solid food. Blood was needed to refresh and restore their strength, and most of the vamps got their supply through some Red Cross back channels, or held a blood drive here in Ordinary to sample the local flavors.
It was a nice way for the town to unknowingly support their neighbors, knowingly feel like they’d done a good deed to save lives—and they had: undead lives—and it allowed the no-non-consensual-biting rule to remain in place.
Still, I didn’t think Ben was hankering for diner food.
Jame, on the other hand, might be on for a full meal deal. Werewolves were carnivores with high metabolisms. According to some recent horrified gossip in the Wolfe camp, one of the younger girls had gone vegan. It was almost enough of a shock to take the Wolfe family attention off of Jame and Ben’s illicit relationship.
“Eat here often?” I asked.
“Now and again,” Jame said in his low, soft voice. Everything about him seemed thick and solid: shoulders, chest, arms, fingers. Even his dark hair and closely trimmed, slightly reddish beard were thick.
Ben, who was half Jame’s body mass was just as strong as his partner, if not stronger. Vampires tended to be slender, but that did not make them weak.
“Why are you here tonight, Chief?” Ben asked with a knowing look.
Piper appeared at that moment, and handed Ben and Jame menus. As she reached, I noted she had written #5 T-sour on her pad.
“Hey there, gentlemen. Can I get you tomato juice? Lemonade?”
“Tomato juice,” Ben said.
“Lemonade,” Jame said.
That wasn’t odd, right? Out of all the drink items on the menu she had chosen the two they wanted. Or had they just agreed to her suggestions because it was easy? Maybe she’d served them before and remembered what they liked to drink.
“Have you decided on dinner yet?” she asked me.
“I’ll have the soup and half a turkey on sourdough,” I said. “And keep the coffee coming.”
“You know I will.” She moved her pen like she was writing on the pad only it didn’t look like the pen pressed to the paper.
She walked off to refill a coffee cup a few tables down.
“Can I see your menu?” I asked.
Ben handed me his. “I already know what I’m getting.”
Jame laughed once, a sort of low chuffing sound. “They make better fries at Jump Off Jack.”
“Please,” Ben scoffed. “Any fry in a storm.”
Jame was studying the menu, his eyes bright with laughter, but also very focused. I wasn’t surprised to see him staring at the steak section like maybe he was going to order one of everything.
“I didn’t like the ribs, right?”
“Too much sauce,” Ben affirmed. “Do the porter steak. Extra pepper, extra rare.”
It was cute how they’d been a couple long enough to know each other’s preferences. It made something in the center of my chest sort of ache. I’d never really had someone in my life who knew me well enough to order off the menu for me.
Well, except my sisters.
But the connection between these two men wasn’t at all on the same level as a sibling tie. They were part of each other’s lives because they chose to be.
Despite all the outside pressure that seemed more than willing to keep them apart.
I scanned the menu. #5 was the soup and sandwich. Piper had already written that down on the pad before I ordered. The T-sour, I assumed was the turkey on sourdough bread that went with my soup.
So Piper definitely had an ability she wasn’t talking about. I’d have to find a way to bring it up to her. Let her know she was safe here. Let her know she wasn’t the only person who had some kind of skill, power, magic.
Ben pushed the condiment carrier against the wall, and leaned back, one arm draped behind Jame, hand dropping to his boyfriend’s back pocket. “Have you made any progress on the case?�
�
“Which one?” I put the menu down and Jame set his on top of mine, lining up the corners.
“The murder.”
I inhaled, nodded as I released the air slowly through my nose. “We still don’t have the murderer pinned down, but we’re getting closer. Do you know anything about his death?”
Ben narrowed his eyes as if fighting off a flash of a headache. “Sven was...private.”
Jame chuffed again and Ben grimaced. “Even more private than most of us Rossis. But he was the newest here in town. And I think...I think he came here to get away from something.”
“And you think that something was what caught up to him?”
He frowned and dragged his fingertip in looping circles on the Linoleum table top. “He had scars. I saw him without his shirt once.”
Jame raised an eyebrow, his nostrils going wide. Ben immediately responded to that slight shift in his partner’s body language. “Please. He was so not my type. It was at the bar where he worked. Someone barfed nachos with extra cheese all over him while he was trying to get them into a cab. It was dark, but he took off his shirt to change into a clean one he had in the trunk of his car.”
“What kind of scars? Where were they?”
“Across his back, shoulder-to-shoulder. It was writing. Carved into his flesh, and whip marks all the way down to his belt line.”
I didn’t know if vampires could heal scars they received before they were turned. “Were they uh...recent?”
“We don’t scar,” he said, answering my unasked question.
“So before he was turned. Okay. Do you know what the writing said?”
“It was a little hard to see, and I’m rusty on my Latin...but yeah. I’m pretty sure it said: Divide and Rule.”
I let the words settle in my brain, trying to make a connection. “In Latin?”
“Yes.” His eyes flicked up to mine, as if that should mean something more to me.
“Rossi was Roman,” I finally said.
Ben nodded slowly. “Yes.”
Okay, but that still didn’t do me a lot of good. “Do you think those words have something to do with Rossi?”
